About 50,000 years ago in East Africa, in the middle of the last ice age, archaeologists find the first evidence of the modern mind: beads!
These led to carved pendants and, in Europe, to fully representational cave art. Tools became much finer, and barbed fishing spearheads appear. Sewing needles are seen by the coldest part of the ice age. Bone and antler came to be used for sharp tools, and were even decorated with carvings. Finally we can say, "These people probably thought a lot like we do," a statement that cannot be made anytime earlier.
Once agriculture allowed towns and specialized occupations to develop by 6,000 years ago, writing developed from tax accounting about 5,000 years ago in Sumer. No genetic change is needed to explain reading (indeed, only a small percentage were literate until a few centuries ago); once exposed to books, the child's brain seems to soft-wire itself on the fly to develop specialized regions for reading.
We pyramid levels of organization: from phonemes to words, words to sentences, sentences to narratives to ethics. We build a house of cards in the mind as we search for a metaphor. We search for coherence, ways in which things unexpectedly hang together - and the pleasure we get from finding it has spawned an enormous range of art and technology, pyramiding complexity while miniaturizing it all, allowing computers to expand what we can accomplish with a little thought. But what satisfies us, among all the new possibilities we turn up, is based on the little-understood emotional intelligence carried over from the ape heritage and the life of the ice ages.
But if this is what we mean by "mind," its history is indeed brief. It's the last one percent of the 6 million years since we shared a common ancestor with the chimps and bonobos. Our ancestors were Homo sapiens for a 100,000 years but, despite the big brain, they were not "behaviorally modern" Homo sapiens sapiens.
They were capable of a certain amount of routine "planning" (food preparation and toolmaking that involved distinct stages, building on one another). Surely their throwing and hammering were versatile. They might have had some language (perhaps the words and short sentences of a modern two-year-old).
The big step up is probably not to symbolic expression itself, as has been assumed for the last half century. More likely, the big step is from symbols in short sentences up to using them in long sentences, ones that require some structuring notions - indeed, perhaps the step is up to structured thought more generally, not just structure for language.
You don't need syntax for the short sentences of the modern toddler. But without some structuring conventions, you couldn't say something as long as "Who did what to whom, why, and how" much faster than you could pantomime it all. The relationship between four or more words is simply too ambiguous without some scaffolding to hold them in place, some structuring conventions (which we call grammar or syntax).
The ability to order our thoughts ("I think I saw him leave to go home" is three sentences nested inside a fourth, like Russian dolls) was probably a package deal, thanks to some multiple-use neural machinery. This structured thought package brought us not only syntax but also contingent planning and gambling, games with rules, and more versatile chains of logic. Indeed, it probably created our fascination with discovering hidden patterns in the world around us, and gave us our ability to appreciate structured music.
All of these "higher intellectual functions" are still full of bugs, just out of beta. Take logic. As merchants know all too well, our decision making is easily swayed by the last thing we happen to hear. It often overrides our more rational consideration of the alternatives.
Trying to impose order on chaos, we find patterns where none exist, sometimes imagining voices when it is only the sounds of the wind. Like computers, we still hang up (or even crash from seizures - though not as often as Windows). Lacking a reset button, we seek mind-clearing retreats into a here-and-now mental state by meditating with a mantra - or dampening the persistent concerns with alcohol and other drugs.
Where does mind go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education and new tools - but with its slowly-evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored to the ice ages? Will we get the bugs out, or just leap into greater capabilities with even more bugs?